Re: [hatari-devel] Hatari clock question

[Uwe Seimet <Uwe.Seimet@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

> On Mittwoch, 17. August 2022 11:22:16 CEST Eero Tamminen wrote:
> > I was thinking about potential problems in the future, when the date (the
> > 
> > > year in particular) value increases.
> 
> I think the year value alone is not a problem in forseeable future. TOS/GEMDOS 
> year is starting at 1980, with 7 bits for the value, making the maximum year 
> 2107. And even if you only have 2 decimal digits stored in a RTC, starting at 
> 1968, that will give a maximum of 2067.
> 
> The lowest problematic value for me seems to be ~2038, when the time is 
> converted to seconds since 1970, and will then overflow a signed 32bit value. 
> That is something that an emulator can't do much about. I guess lots of old 
> programs will then run into problems.

I agree, but I was referring to programs which fail before 2038. I recently
stumbled upon a Mac application for setting the clock, which did not accept
a year value of more than 2020. If something like that happened with an Atari
program you would not be able to use it with Hatari. At least not without
changing the host system time.
So this is about taking precautions, in case there is such a software for
the Atari.

Best regards

Uwe